scholarly journals NYC POPS: Exploring Human Agency of the Public Sphere

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna Constable
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Privately Owned

<p>This thesis aims to investigate, through design, spatial agency within the realm of New York City’s Privately Owned Public Spaces. The notion of agency in architecture is directly linked to social and political power. Starting in 1961, New York’s city planners introduced an incentive zoning scheme (POPS) which encouraged private builders to include public spaces in their developments. Many are in active public use, but others are hard to find, under surveillance, or essentially inaccessible. Within the existing POPS sites, tension is current between the ideals of public space - completely open, accessible - and the limitations imposed by those who create and control it. Designed to be singular, contained, and mono-functional, POPS do not yet allow for newer ideas of public space as multi-functional, not contained/bounded but extending and overlapping outward.  As public-private partnerships become the model for catalyzing urban (re)development in the late 20th century, bonus space is an increasingly common land use type in major cities across the world. The quality and nature of bonus spaces created in exchange for floor area bonuses varies greatly. In many cases, tensions in privately owned space produce a severely constricted definition of the public and public life. Incentive zoning programmes continue to serve as a model for numerous urban zoning regulations, so changing ideas of public space and its design need to be tested in such spaces.  These urban plazas offer a test case through which to examine agency, exploring how social space is also political space, charged with the dynamics of power/ empowerment, interaction/ isolation, control/ freedom. This thesis looks at one such site, the connecting plaza sites along Sixth Avenue between West 47th St and West 51st St. This is an extreme example of concentrated POPS sites in New York City. Here one’s perception and occupation of space is profoundly affected by the underlying design of that space which reflects its private ownership. Privately Owned Public Space can be designed that is capable of/ challenging the notion of the public in public space, and modifying the structure of the city and its social life.</p>

scholarly journals NYC POPS: Exploring Human Agency of the Public Sphere

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Anna Constable
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Privately Owned

<p>This thesis aims to investigate, through design, spatial agency within the realm of New York City’s Privately Owned Public Spaces. The notion of agency in architecture is directly linked to social and political power. Starting in 1961, New York’s city planners introduced an incentive zoning scheme (POPS) which encouraged private builders to include public spaces in their developments. Many are in active public use, but others are hard to find, under surveillance, or essentially inaccessible. Within the existing POPS sites, tension is current between the ideals of public space - completely open, accessible - and the limitations imposed by those who create and control it. Designed to be singular, contained, and mono-functional, POPS do not yet allow for newer ideas of public space as multi-functional, not contained/bounded but extending and overlapping outward.  As public-private partnerships become the model for catalyzing urban (re)development in the late 20th century, bonus space is an increasingly common land use type in major cities across the world. The quality and nature of bonus spaces created in exchange for floor area bonuses varies greatly. In many cases, tensions in privately owned space produce a severely constricted definition of the public and public life. Incentive zoning programmes continue to serve as a model for numerous urban zoning regulations, so changing ideas of public space and its design need to be tested in such spaces.  These urban plazas offer a test case through which to examine agency, exploring how social space is also political space, charged with the dynamics of power/ empowerment, interaction/ isolation, control/ freedom. This thesis looks at one such site, the connecting plaza sites along Sixth Avenue between West 47th St and West 51st St. This is an extreme example of concentrated POPS sites in New York City. Here one’s perception and occupation of space is profoundly affected by the underlying design of that space which reflects its private ownership. Privately Owned Public Space can be designed that is capable of/ challenging the notion of the public in public space, and modifying the structure of the city and its social life.</p>

scholarly journals An Intersectional Analysis of Urban Public Interiors

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin I. Tehve ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Essential Characteristic ◽  
False Image ◽  
Physical Spaces ◽  
Privately Owned

This paper proposes an analysis of New York City’s Interior Privately owned Public Spaces (INT POPS) and the quality of public space they generate. Intersectionality here is a methodology to examine key attributes of INT POPS simultaneously. This method offers opportunities to question prevailing typologies of the term public that are oppositional in nature; this opposition serves to occlude the mutually dependent nature of the types. INT POPS are vaguely programmed, bounded, enclosed and enable proximity, and generate a social space recognizable as an essential characteristic of urban life: a visible aggregation of individuals prior to definition as a collective. Without a simultaneous examination of the physical spaces themselves and the rules, laws and codes that govern them these spaces a false image of a universally accessible space is produced.

‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
State Power ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

scholarly journals Simulation, Control and Desire. Urban Commons and Semi-Public Space Resilience in the Age of Augmented Transductive Territorial Production

2019 ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfredo Manfredini
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
External Control ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spatial Production ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right ◽  
Urban Commons

Considering place-based participation a crucial factor for the development of sustainable and resilient cities in the post-digital turn age, this paper addresses the socio-spatial implications of the recent transformation of relationality networks. To understand the drivers of spatial claims emerged in conditions of digitally augmented spectacle and simulation, it focuses on changes occurring in key nodes of central urban public and semi-public spaces of rapidly developing cities. Firstly, it proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of problems related to socio-spatial fragmentation, polarisation and segregation of urban commons subject to external control. Secondly, it discusses opportunities and criticalities emerging from a representational paradox depending on the ambivalence in the play of desire found in digitally augmented semi-public spaces. The discussion is structured to shed light on specific socio-spatial relational practices that counteract the dissipation of the “common worlds” caused by sustained processes of urban gentrification and homogenisation. The theoretical framework is developed from a comparative critical urbanism approach inspired by the right to the city and the right to difference, and elaborates on the discourse on sustainable development that informs the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda. The analysis focuses on how digitally augmented geographies reintroduce practices of participation and commoning that reassemble fragmented relational infrastructures and recombine translocal social, cultural and material elements. Empirical studies on the production of advanced simulative and transductive spatialities in places of enhanced consumption found in Auckland, New Zealand, ground the discussion. These provide evidence of the extent to which the agency of the augmented territorialisation forces reconstitutes inclusive and participatory systems of relationality. The concluding notes, speculating on the emancipatory potential found in these social laboratories, are a call for a radical redefinition of the approach to the problem of the urban commons. Such a change would improve the capacity of urbanism disciplines to adequately engage with the digital turn and efficaciously contribute to a maximally different spatial production that enhances and strengthens democracy and pluralism in the public sphere.

scholarly journals Public space: an exhibition of photography and video

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Franchi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
General Public ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Unrestricted Access ◽  
Private Corporations ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public Space is a photographic and video project examining the relationship between the public sphere and private corporations. The project explores various sites throughout Toronto and New York that are on private property but have been built with the intention of allowing the general public to have unrestricted access to these areas. These spaces are referred to as Privately Owned Public Space or “POPS”. The goal of the project is to question and document, through photographic and video practice, these spaces within the urban environment and to challenge others to consider whether these spaces are effective in achieving their intended use and if they are truly accessible to the general public. Loss of the public space is an ongoing issue that faces cities and developers often receive concessions to bylaw zoning requirements in exchange for incorporating POPS. This thesis project is a personal exploration of how these spaces are changing the urban environments of North American cities in the twenty first century.

Analysis on Building Readable Image of Urban Public Spaces

2013 ◽  
Vol 409-410 ◽  
pp. 883-886
Author(s):  
Bo Xuan Zhao ◽  
Cong Ling Meng
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Space Images ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
Good Image ◽  
The Public ◽  
The City

City, is consisting of a series continuous or intermittent public space images, and every image for each of our people living in the city is varied: may be as awesome as forbidden city Meridian Gate, like Piazza San Marco as a cordial and pleasant space and might also be like Manhattan district of New York, which makes people excited and enthusiastic. To see why, people have different feelings because the public urban space ultimately belongs to democratic public space, people live and have emotions in it. In such domain, people can not only be liberated, free to enjoy the pleasures of urban public space, but also enjoy urban life which is brought by the city's charm through highlighting the vitality of the city with humanism atmosphere. To a conclusion, no matter how ordinary the city is, a good image of urban space can also bring people pleasure.

‘A Church in a Cinema Hall?’ Pentecostal Appropriation of Public Space in Nigeria

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olufunke Adeboye
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Church

AbstractOver the past two decades Nigeria has become a hotbed of Pentecostal activity. It is the view of this study that Pentecostal visibility in Nigeria has been enhanced not just by Pentecostals’ aggressive utilization of media technology for proselytization as claimed by previous scholars, but also by their appropriation of public spaces for worship. This study not only focuses on the church in the cinema hall, but also on churches in nightclubs, hotels, and other such places previously demonized as ‘abode[s] of sin’ by classical Pentecostals. This paper argues that users’ perception of public spaces having rigid meanings and unchanging usage was responsible for much of the tensions experienced. It would be more useful for academic analysts and various ‘publics’ to construe such spaces as dynamic sites, at once reflecting mutations in the public sphere, responsive to local and global socio-economic processes, and amenable to periodic reinventions and negotiations.

scholarly journals Rigiditas dan Fleksibilitas Diskursus Fiqih Wanita Hizbut Tahrir

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 459-492
Author(s):  
Umi Chaidaroh
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Islamic Movements ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Public Sphere

Many women in modern times take part in public spaces. Moreover, women are also involved with Islamic movements which are often associated as fundamentalist movements such as Hizbut Tahrir (HT). In Indonesia, HT has a wing of women’s organization called the Muslimah Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (MHTI). Women’s activists play pivotal role in the public space to help HT achieve its goals. Fundamentalist women who work in the public sphere seem to contradict with the growing assumption asserting that Islamic fundamentalist movements are often associated with the magnitude of oppression against women. It has been, however, seems to be a paradox. Considering the aforement-ioned argument, it is important to examine the thoughts concerning women’s jurisprudence of HT. Using compara-tive approach this study focuses on written literature as the main source. The results of the study prove that the thought concerning women’s jurisprudence of HT tends to be rigid. Interestingly, however, the study also finds that within particular cases the jurisprudence shows its flexibility, but it is even can be called liberal.

scholarly journals PUBLIC VS PRIVATE SECTOR OWNED URBAN PUBLIC SPACE PERFORMANCE IN TERMS OF USER PERCEPTION IN CITY OF COLOMBO

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.M. Fayas ◽  
◽  
M.T.O.V. Peiris ◽  
K.G.P. Kalugalla ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
User Perception ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Access Controls ◽  
Publicly Owned ◽  
Privately Owned ◽  
Private Sector Involvement

Public spaces are considered one of the fundamental elements in the urban context to promote leisure and recreation for urban dwellers. Public spaces contain variations within each other from the physical appearance, activities, and to usage factors. Private sector involvement for public space provision was increased in the recent past where public space ownership and access controls were shifted from solely public to private. This was criticized as privatization of public space and lead to debates on the decline of publicness and privacy of space. In this context, this research studied the public space from the user perception by considering publicly owned and operated versus privately owned and operated public spaces within Colombo, Sri Lanka. It is also explored the balance between ownership and access controls to determine the user preference in terms of the publicness features. User defined public space features were identified using 35 semi-structured interviews and 119 online questionnaire surveys. Qualitative analytic tools were used to evaluate the results including Content analysis and Space-shaper models with the support of NVivo software. The results revealed that publicly owned spaces were preferred by the users due to easy access and freedom for activities while privately owned spaces were preferred due to better infrastructure, safety, and security within. Also, it is identified that urban public space offered users the freedom to experience based on the levels of ownership and access controls. Finally, people preferred ownership by public over private sector as anecdotal evidence and values dominated in the public space attributes. This study provides key insights for planners to consider in the public space planning and the importance of private sector involvement and balance in the provision of optimal urban spaces in cities.

Public Space in North American Cities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Ellen Sewell
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Public Parks ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
The Public ◽  
Wide Range

From 1800 to 2000, cities grew enormously, and saw an expansion of public spaces to serve the varied needs of a diverse population living in ever more cramped and urban circumstances. While a wide range of commercial semipublic spaces became common in the late 19th century, parks and streets were the best examples of truly public spaces with full freedom of access. Changes in the design and management of streets, sidewalks, squares, parks, and plazas during this period reflect changing ideas about the purpose of public space and how it should be used. Streets shifted from being used for a wide range of activities, including vending, playing games, and storing goods, to becoming increasingly specialized spaces of movement, designed and managed by the early twentieth century for automobile traffic. Sidewalks, which in the early nineteenth century were paid for and liberally used by adjacent businesses, were similarly specialized as spaces of pedestrian movement. However, the tradition of using streets and sidewalks as a space of public celebration and public speech remained strong throughout the period. During parades and protests, streets and sidewalks were temporarily remade as spaces of the performance of the public, and the daily activities of circulation and commerce were set aside. In 1800, the main open public spaces in cities were public squares or commons, often used for militia training and public celebration. In the second half of the 19th century, these were augmented by large picturesque parks. Designed as an antidote to urbanity, these parks served the public as a place for leisure, redefining public space as a polite leisure amenity, rather than a place for people to congregate as a public. The addition of playgrounds, recreational spaces, and public plazas in the 20th century served both the physical and mental health of the public. In the late 20th century, responding to neoliberal ideas and urban fiscal crises, the ownership and management of public parks and plazas was increasingly privatized, further challenging public accessibility.

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